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Sunday, December 29, 2013

It seems there are always new potentials to explore
with an isolated movie setting in a mansion, small villa, or castle, where a
number of situations with fixed conditions can arise, murders can go unnoticed,
and the sexually liberated can binge to their heart’s content. The peculiar sex
crime thriller Top Sensation (aka The Seducers) embraces the many
possibilities of the isolated story setting but does away with the more conventional
remote house and substitutes it with a private recreational yacht, setting most of the movie on the open sea. Cabins below deck are the lavish bedrooms,
the control room makes a nice study, and the poop deck is obviously the lounge,
for partying, adultery, and all other manner of fun nonsense.

Top Sensation was directed and written
by Ottavio Alessi who has writing
credits for some thirty-two movies, which include Dick Smart 2007 and Emmanuelle
in America, but only two directing credits with Top Sensation being the last film he ever worked on as a director. The soundtrack, by Sante
Maria Romitelli, consists of a melodic and epic sounding piece that
could’ve come from a Spaghetti Western but does still manage to feel very
welcome here and is extremely memorable.

A big selling point to this movie is the fact that it stars Edwige Fenech and Rosalba Neri. Both of these Eurocult goddesses in the same movie,
in the same sex scenes together, is a big deal. Fenech hadn’t quite cemented her fame in several giallo films yet
at the time the film was made, and so the fact that she and Neri were together in the same movie was
probably incidental, but in retrospect it’s a glorious spectacle.
However, after watching Top Sensation
it should be apparent that this is not the film’s only credential.

Sunday, December 8, 2013

I’m starting to realize I have a
weakness for filmmakers who have their own distinct style, the type I could
easily recognize even if I didn’t know what movie I was watching.After having a blast watching several of his
short films on YouTube, I became hooked on a lot of the inherent, and
consistent, characteristics of Czech surrealist animator Jan Svankmajer’s films. He’s a hero of sorts of the stop animation
technique, bringing inanimate objects like food and clay sculptures to life in
very perplexing ways. What really got me, after watching a particular short
film by Svankmajer, simply titled Food, was the way actual human actors
were utilized in stop motion sequencing, something known as pixilation, which
created a super strange reality, where people seemed to hover around and move like
androids, and eat like monsters. Of course, stop motion has quite often been
used by many filmmakers, but Svankmajer’s
surreal style tends to lead to pretty morbid and bizarre visuals that are also
amusing and humorous (the fourteen minute short Virile Games (1988) comes to mind).

After making short films for
twenty years, Jan Svankmajer made his
first full length movie, Alice,
inspired by Lewis Carroll’s novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865),
a book that is supposedly for kids but still works for adult readers too,
especially ones still in touch with their inner child. The anthropomorphic
creatures of Carroll’s dreamland present
a perfect opportunity for Svankmajer to
create a unique vision with his distinct stop animation style. It’s also that
much creepier and a tad bit disturbing that most of
the creature models used were once living animals, like the skulls, the stuffed White Rabbit, or the barracuda head.

Just about everything we know from the
book is done with a different interpretation, here. Perhaps the simple title of
Alice is fitting enough, for her
dream doesn’t really feel quite like the Wonderland we all know. In this case,
the title Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland could be modified to something more like “Alice’s Nightmares in
an Animator’s Workshop.”